Please join us on Friday, March 8, 2019 at 11:00am in Cobb 311 for the final meeting of the Mass Culture Workshop for the Winter Quarter. We are delighted to have Meghanne Barker, Collegiate Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Meghanne will be presenting the final chapter from her book manuscript entitled “Stepping Out of the Frame.” Responding to the chapter is Marissa Fenley, PhD Student in English and TAPS.
Meghanne’s chapter is available for download here.
Please do not circulate without permission.
Please email either Gary [gkafer@uchicago.edu] or Cooper [cooperlong@uchicago.edu] for the password.
This session will be co-sponsored by the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop.
Refreshment will be provided.
We look forward to seeing you!
Yours in Mass Cult,
Gary and Cooper
Stepping Out of the Frame
This chapter follows two protagonists as they move out of the frame in which they have been placed, as they move from their second home, the site of their temporary displacement, back to their first home. The chapter moves between the story of Kashtanka, a dog who makes her debut at a circus and is discovered by her first masters, and of Marlin, a boy at Hope House, the temporary children’s home in Kazakhstan where I conducted my research. It follows Marlin on his last day as he makes his way home with his father. It looks not only at the plot of the play of Kashtanka itself, but also at the ways relationships were threatened, ruptured, and repaired among the artists working to put together this play at the Almaty Puppet Theater. The chapter examines the role of various kinds of frames – the frames of performance, of mediating technologies, and even physical frames for text objects – in enabling decontextualization and recontextualization, thus offering new perspectives and mitigating loss as people move out of particular frames and into new spaces.
Meghanne Barker is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in Social Sciences and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. She is a linguistic anthropologist whose research examines intersections of play, performance, materiality, and childhood in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Barker received her PhD in 2017 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is currently developing this research into two book projects. First, an ethnographic monograph, Animating Childhood in Almaty, shows the role of everyday enactments of ideal childhood, family, and home for preschool-aged children growing up in a temporary, state-run home. In her second book project, Puppets of the State, Barker expands her historical investigation of the vast network of Soviet-era, state-run puppet theaters and their contemporary legacy, examining puppets’ roles in socializing young citizens and in international campaigns of soft power through tours and festivals.